Fun Stuff (as if you haven't wasted enough time)

Disclaimer

Unless they are attributed to someone else, the opinions posted on this blog are Jeff Weintraub's (the blog's creator and sole proprietor, pictured above) and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer, clients, family, friends or anyone else who might even be remotely associated with him, wittingly or unwittingly. In short, don't blame others for Jeff's crazy ideas, which he conjures up on his own.

Calls to Action

YachadSupport needed community development and home repair in the D.C. area.

Interfaith Youth CoreSupport young people as they strengthen their religious identities, foster inter-religious understanding and serve community.

Memorable NPR Stories

Become a Fan

First, congratulations. I give you a lot of credit for keeping the faith in your candidate and doing what you needed to do to put him in the White House. And, despite my concerns, I sincerely hope that he and the people around him do what’s best for the country.

I know that many of you see his election as a bright opportunity. I can’t take that away from you. Nor would I even try. After all we’ve been through during the last 18 months especially, I have no illusion that I can somehow convince you otherwise. I really hope you’re right.

Likewise, you can’t take away from me and many others like me (about half the country) that, since the early hours of November 9, I’ve had a constant, sickening sensation not just of loss, but real fear. My fear is that his election has ushered in a meaner mood among Americans and that Trump’s reckless behavior and ideas will plunge us into circumstances far more desperate than the ones he claims to be fixing.

Sorry if this offends you, but it’s precisely what I feel. Please hear me out.

Just as I truly do not minimize the concerns that led many to vote for Trump, I hope you won’t dismiss mine as the usual bellyaching by those whose candidates didn’t win. I’ve been on the losing side of enough elections to know that this is far different.

To be absolutely frank with you, what worries me most is that some of the worst behaviors and views that Trump and his supporters uttered, or in some cases refused to denounce, didn’t keep you from voting for him.

I know some of you personally, and have chatted with you over the last year. I’m convinced that you’re not bigots, that patent dishonesty, extreme arrogance and unethical business practices offend your sensibilities, that you abhor sexual assault and sexism, that an apparent admiration for the style and approaches of autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin trouble you deeply, that you agree that suggestions to reign in press freedoms are dangerous and that threatening to throw your political opponent in jail (on something that even the FBI concluded was not worth prosecuting) is beyond the pale, and you understand that plain old nastiness and vulgarity are not appropriate for a President of the United States.

I trust you agree with me on all that. But, apparently, those very real – how to say? – failings bothered you far less than they did me and many others. Whereas I took quite literally some of Trump's most alarming pronouncements, you did not, figuring, I guess, that, as President, he will grow into the role of the prudent statesman.

That’s a valid choice, but a gamble. It’s a bet that Trump will stick to the actual policy matters that you care about – international trade, Supreme Court nominations, gun rights, abortion, immigration policy, the Iran nuclear deal, the Affordable Care Act, etc. – and leave all the rest behind. It’s a wager that he was, like so many politicians, pressing some buttons in order to get elected but will be a different person as President. I’ve heard many of your fellow supporters say just that.

Obviously, I hope that bet pays off the way you think it will. A lot is at stake. For example, I’m part of a religious minority in this country that heard some terrifying suggestions about us in this campaign, and, if I were a member of a number of other groups that Trump and his surrogates threatened with even more fervor, I would likewise be very afraid. And do you really think that throttling the press or rationalizing assaults against women will be good for America?

The problem is that there is a pretty long and convincing record that Trump will be the guy he was during the campaign and has always been. Even worse, there’s the prospect that some of the most hateful and potentially dangerous people in our society have been encouraged and emboldened by him and will hold more sway than they deserve. I assume that worries you as much as it worries me.

In that case, my big question to you is: if some of those worst fears about Trump begin to materialize, what will you say? Will you dismiss them, as you apparently did when you voted for him, and tell the rest of us we are overreacting or that they don’t matter? Or will you speak up, tell Trump and your other elected representatives that that’s not what you voted for? To borrow a trite phrase: which side will you be on?

I ask you with all due respect and not because I’m trying to hector you or shout you down. Honestly. I don’t want to argue. For the moment, I’m not interested in endless, futile bickering about whether or not each of us thinks it’s a good idea to scrap NAFTA or the ACA or about whether Hillary Clinton is a saint or a sinner. Those issues are beside the point of this query and not really what's feeding my worst fears (though they worry me). This is about President Trump.

I really, really want to know what you will do if (hopefully not when) some of the bad stuff that his campaign suggested becomes a reality. Because, knowing that he and his team will probably not be listening to me, I want some reassurance that the ones they will hear – the people like you who voted for him – will do what you need to do. Can you give it to me?

In my opinion, this is the biggest question of the moment. Not just for those of us who did not vote for Donald Trump but, trust me (to use a Trump interjection), for you, too.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

[Note: I posted this simultaneously on Facebook. To see comments, go to: https://www.facebook.com/jeff.weintraub/posts/10210841266286779

ONE OF THE big questions most Americans ask in the context of our national debate about guns is why any civilian would need so many and such powerful guns, with fewer licensing requirements than it takes to drive a car legally. The only coherent answer I can discern from anti-gun control advocates is that ordinary citizens need to arm themselves to prevent repression by the government (colorfully characterized in 1995 by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s as “jack-booted government thugs”). That was pretty much all anti-gun control advocate Alex Jones argued in his spectacular tirade a couple of weeks ago on Piers Morgan’s CNN show. This is at least the ostensible argument they make on this subject, so let's examine it more closely for a moment.

What they’re missing is this: guns will not – and have not – saved the American people from government repression. No, what has kept Americans safe from such a fate is something much more powerful and worthy of our preservation: the rule of law. And, given that the rule of law is established and maintained by people – citizens of good faith committed to a secure society – I think it’s fair to say that guns don’t protect people, people do.

Back in the early 1990s, as a staffer at a Jewish public policy organization in Washington, D.C., I was the lead organizer of a series of “vigils against gun violence,” an initiative hatched by a group of the city’s African American and Jewish leaders. Every week at lunchtime for several months, a few dozen of us would mill about for an hour in Scott Circle just across from the D.C. headquarters of the National Rifle Association, then on 16th Street, with placards and brochures (no blogs then) that expressed our outrage with flimsy laws that seemed to aid and abet gun violence locally and across the country. (Not long after, the NRA moved over the river many miles away into Virginia. Coincidence?)

In short order, I began to get letters and calls from a small, but strident Jewish anti-gun control group, whose representatives harangued me for my involvement in the demonstrations.

One of their articles of faith was (and still is) that European Jews could have prevented the Holocaust had there been no restrictions against gun ownership during the rise of the Nazis. Indeed, they still argue, gun control – or, as they would call it, “disarmament” – was a necessary precursor to nearly every genocide over the last hundred years or so. According to their thinking, another genocide against the Jews could even happen here, too, in the United States, so we must prepare by arming ourselves. Only a foolish Jew like me, with a poor understanding of history, they admonished, would have the bad judgment to support gun control laws in the U.S.

There are, of course, problems with the argument about Nazi Germany. For one, it’s counterfactual – a guess about what might have happened if history had taken different turns than it did – which most historians steadfastly discourage because it’s impossible prove that which did not occur. Indeed, using counterfactual reasoning, I can just as soundly argue that an armed insurrection of German Jews would have given the Nazis another pretext for rounding up all these enemies of the state and "eliminating" them somehow. But I don't really know that for sure, do I? And it’s hard to imagine that, even if every German Jew possessed and was inclined to use a firearm, they would have been able to overwhelm what became a powerfully armed Nazi police and military state.

More importantly, what made the Holocaust possible was not the absence of guns under every German Jewish bed but the disappearance of the rule of law.

Ironically enough, before the rise of the Third Reich, Germany was a society with a highly sophisticated body of laws. But by 1932, the German political system, still weakened by post-Great War provisions, was in chaos. The Nazis took advantage of the situation and won election to rule the country. In 1933, after staging a fire on the Reichstag, the nation’s parliament, the Nazis claimed that Germany was under attack by Communists and other “terrorists.” That gave them an excuse to impose a “temporary” emergency suspension of fundamental rights for Germans and to the transfer the powers of the democratically elected parliament into Hitler’s hands.

From that point on, “Hitler stood outside the legal constraints of the state apparatus whenever he perceived the need to adopt policies and make decisions that he deemed necessary for the survival of the German race,” as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains it .“This extra-legal line of authority, known as the “Führer Executive” (Führerexekutiv) or the "Führer principle" (Führerprinzip) extended down through the ranks of the Nazi party, the SS, the state bureaucracy, and the armed forces. It allowed for agencies of the party, state, and armed forces to operate outside the law when necessary to achieve the ideological goals of the regime, while maintaining the fiction of adhering to legal norms.”

With that, almost nothing prevented the Nazis from steadily and thoroughly stripping rights from Jews and others the Reich considered enemies of the state and from arming itself as it did. Technically, the Nazis had the law, which they had hijacked, on their side. It was the people's acquisence early on during the Nazi rule that enabled the tyrants to prevail. It was people, not guns, that enabled the Nazis to come to power and later strip the Jews and other victims of their rights and lives.

As for the argument that it (a Holocaust) could happen here (in America), I say, of course. Anything is possible. But likely? Maybe this is whistling past the graveyard, but I doubt it, unless America undergoes an immediate and radical cultural transformation. To repeat a trite, but nonetheless true, notion, America is a nation that abides by the rule of law, not by the rule of one or a few people. People can complain that our laws and enforcement of laws is sometimes stifling and tedious. Our system is not without its drawbacks all the time and for everyone. But consider an America without such a tradition and practice. Our devotion to the large print of the Constitution and the fine print of the zillions of laws and regulations that sensible people have promulgated through tried and true procedure is what makes a “Holocaust” (against any people) so unlikely in America.

All that procedure we saw the other day as our President took his second Oath of Office was not just a show of pageantry to make “the people” and their leaders feel a lump of patriotism in their throats. It is a reminder that we have an agreed-upon set of rules that we all must follow, which, for the most part, Americans do. Obama, and every President before him, came to power through rule of law, something that the Nazis perverted, and a broken German political system failed to prevent, in the early '30s. And, in case that isn’t obvious enough, why do you think the Chief Justice of the United States, the primary steward of our laws, administers the Oath?

Rule of law is what has made America probably the most hospitable place for Jews outside the modern and ancient Jewish states. Rule of law, not chauvinistic chest pounding about U.S. superiority in the world, is what makes for its exceptionalism today and across the arc of history.

Government operated by rule of law is not a threat to our personal liberties, contrary to what some anti-gun control advocates and others seem to be saying. As President Obama said in his second inaugural speech, "(P)reserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

Someone who uses the gun to protect himself from such a government is not really upholding the great traditions of this land. He is taking the law into his own hands. He is bypassing the will of the people. He is performing a highly unpatriotic act.

LAST YEAR I read a terrific book by Adam Goodheart called 1861: The Civil War Awakening. As the title suggests, it’s about the eve and early hours of the American Civil War and the myriad factors that pushed the nation inevitably into it. Goodheart paints a vivid picture of a nation so profoundly fractured and its citizens so jaded by any possible last-ditch compromises that war became truly – and sadly – the only logical next step.

The tension Goodheart described felt a lot like what I was feeling in 2011, and now, on Election Day 2012, I feel it just the same. Please don’t misunderstand me: I didn’t think then we were on the precipice of a 21st century America civil war, and I still don’t. To say so would be overly alarmist and minimize how badly damaged America was in 1861.

But the sense that the conflict is unstoppable and, yet, unsustainable is all too familiar today. That's why I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that, whoever wins the White House and Congress today, their biggest challenge will not be rescuing the budget, boosting the economy, solving the health care conundrum, grappling with the flaring conflicts and looming security threats around the world and settling our strained relationship with nations such as China.

Tough and important as those are, our leaders’ biggest and maybe most difficult problem will be defusing a highly fraught social and political atmosphere that pervades all of public discourse these days. Indeed, it’s obvious that we can’t solve the big problems because we don’t have a modus operandi and a modicum of trust for moving ahead. Today (and for a while now) we have two large blocs of Americans who not only disagree about what should be but also about what is. It’s hard to find common ground and to solve problems when there are two often competing views of reality.

I fancy myself as rather post-partisan – that is, able and willing to look past what my preferred party and ideological peer group says. But that’s probably more wishful thinking than anything. No one, certainly not I, can be completely free of partisan bias.

Like so many others, I see mostly wrongheaded thinking and misperception on the other side of the spectrum and sensible, practical thinking on mine. And, in case my other blog posts aren’t obvious enough, I’m also burdened by the firm belief that the “other guys” are mostly responsible for the vituperation, intellectual dishonesty and vicious partisanship that has so poisoned the air and paralyzed our problem solving in the last number of years. But I accept, too, that they probably feel, with equal conviction, the same about “our guys.” That’s what we’re dealing with.

If I were President (oy vey), I’m not sure I’d know what solution to try first. This is really hard, especially for either Obama or Romney, men who are so strongly disliked and mistrusted by those who oppose them. They have to be part of the solution to this, but surely can’t do it alone. Who else is responsible? Media? Politicos? Citizen activists? Entertainers? Business leaders? Unions? Yes, all of those and more.

I’m sure political philosophers and civil society experts are way ahead of me on this, but I can think of at least a few values that all of us need to embrace if we’re going to move away from constant and continued conflict. I’d like to hear what others might add too.

We need a little less sanctimony, the sense that we alone stand on the highest and holiest ground. Maybe that’s true for some of us at fleeting moments in our lives, but not as much as most of us probably think.

We need a little more compassion. I don’t mean love or even respect, though those are nice values, too. I mean a real effort to understand where that other person or party is coming from and why. That won’t – and needn’t – require me to abandon my position for someone else’s. Indeed, we probably better understand our own views the more we get to know others’.

We need a lot less presumption. Too often, based on only a snippet (sometimes unintelligible) of information, we form strong assumptions about what our adversaries (or even fellow travelers) are thinking or about what motivates them. Whether he is trying to trigger class war or motivated by racism, we presume to know precisely what’s going on in that other person’s head, even when we’re really only reading tea leaves.

We need more honesty, about ourselves and others. As Mark Twain once said, “When in doubt, tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends."

We need to see one another as real human beings not as abstractions. It’s so easy, and misleading, to “know” everything about another person by relying on shorthand labels like “liberal,” “conservative,” “socialist” or “libertarian.” I do this all the time and am constantly surprised by how, when I meet a real, live person from one of those categories, they often don’t fit as neatly as they should.

We need a lot more humility. That is, we have to develop the capacity to recognize that we’re not always right and to declare ourselves more gently when we are right.

Universal values? Basic decency? The stuff we were supposed to learn in kindergarten? Yeah, it’s all of that. Concrete and comprehensive enough to heal a nation? No, not even close. But this is what our nation should be talking about immediately, tomorrow morning. This is the most urgent item on our national agenda. The usual confrontation that characterizes our civic life these days is killing us.

Our current slide into further incivility and division seems as inexorable as it might have to American citizens of 1861. I'm hard pressed, frankly, to figure how we might truly turn it around. But while the citizens of 1861 had, by that time, exhausted all hope that conflict was avoidable, we can still save the day. We have no other choice.

IF THERE is any agreement across the ideological spectrum on the subject of immigration policy, it is that our currrent system is broken.

For those with good sense, the solution is a holistic -- and rather complex -- set of provisions addressing the myriad drivers and symptons of the broken system. It's a complicated problem, but many smart and dedicated people have drawn up the contours of policy that could just wrestle it to the ground, if not solve it completely and with the snap of the fingers.

For those who just want to use immigrants as a political punching bag, the solutions are crude and painful, both to immigrants themselves and to the country as a whole. In spite of what they may say, they really don't want sensible and effective immigration reform and for too many years have torpedoed efforts to fix our immigration system (such as a 2007 federal immigration reform bill that, while not perfect, would have left us better off than we are now). Fueled by the extremist talk-radio and TV shouters, this constituency has so terrified our political leaders to do anything to fix the problem, that the prospect of even talking out loud about a fix has been remote at least since the 2007 federal bill went down in flames.

And, ironically, many of the same people who are undermining good-faith attempts at true immigration reform justify their hideous policy solutions by saying that they are acting only because Congress failed to -- as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer did in 2010 when she signed SB 1070, which infamously requires state and local law enforcement officials to question anyone who appears to be an illegal immigrant.That's the same sort of hypocrisy we hear from many of the other proponents of draconia (and ineffective) immigration measures, such as the Alabama law designed to make life for immigrants in the state so miserable they will "self deport." (Yes, "self deportation" is the same policy embraced by Governor Mitt Romney, whose views on immigration policy suggest he, too, has been cowed by the extremists.)

What's truly notable and encouraging about this group is not just what they said but who they are. They represent communities and points of views within the Evangelical community that hardly agree on much else, particularly hot-button issues like abortion or GLBT rights.

On these and other isssues, many of these groups are usually screaming at one another, though they've found common cause in the past on matters such as the aspects of the environment, global human rights and poverty. It might suprise liberals, who disagree strenuously (as I do) with Evangelicals on many issues. But it shouldn't. It's important for everyone to understand that in many areas, the compassion of conservatives isn't much different from the compassion of liberals.

On June 12, these leaders, as part of a coalition called the Evangelical Immigration Table, stepped up and said:

Our national immigration laws have created a moral, economic and political crisis in America. Initiatives to remedy this crisis have led to polarization and name calling in which opponents have misrepresented each other’s positions as open borders and amnesty versus deportations of millions. This false choice has led to an unacceptable political stalemate at the federal level at a tragic human cost.

As evangelical Christian leaders, we call for a bipartisan solution on immigration that: Respects the God-given dignity of every person; Protects the unity of the immediate family; Respects the rule of law; Guarantees secure national borders; Ensures fairness to taxpayer; Establishes a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents.

We urge our nation’s leaders to work together with the American people to pass immigration reform that embodies these key principles and that will make our nation proud.

As far as I can tell, that's about as specific as they've gotten in their written statements, press conferences and radio advertising. So, sure, the details that derive from those broad principles are subject to many interpretations. But I'm encouraged because these leaders seem to understand the solution has to be multi-facted and comprehensive. Building higher and longer border fences and roughing up a bunch of illegal immigrants -- the old chestnuts of the extremist anti-immigrant camp -- simply aren't going to fix the problem.

I don't usually get too excited when religious leaders issue statements of principle on major policy matters. Not because I don't respect what they're trying to do -- use their moral and communal prestige to help mobilize opinion. That's admirable and important in any society.

But too often these statements are ineffective, either because they're watered down as a result of a need for consensus or, more likely, because they give little if any cover for policy makers to take a courageous stand. The result is that few people, particularly the very policy makers who have the power to make a change, give much attention to these statements. Sadly, nothing happens.

Though I don't think we should hold out collective breath, this could be different, if only because of the presence of so many conservative voices in the Evangelical Immigration Table. They have enormous constituencies and political clout that can, hopefully, neutralize immigration reform opponents, who are almost entirely conservative.

They're also giving the lie to the assumption many have that comprehensive immigration reform is just a liberal dream and a Democratic Party political play for the growing Latino vote. The truth is, there has long been a lot of conservative support for immigration reform. Some pro-immigration reform conservatives represent the interests of businesses that rely heavily on immigrant talent and others who see the issue through a libertarian lens (believing in the unfettered movement of capital, in this case human capital).

Now, if that's the case and they've done little to bring about real reform, what makes me hopeful that this coalition might be different? Well, again, don't let's all hold our breath on this just yet. This is really one of many pieces we need to build a solid constituency for reform. But religious leaders, perhaps more than business and purely ideological leaders, have shown an ability to influence their communities through moral language and the emotional responses it can evoke.

Maybe more importantly, and this will sound crass, many of these communities, understand that their own survival depends on the growing numbers of immigrants (legal and illegal) in their ranks. They have a self interest beyond mere compassion and a desire to fix a broken system. As Lisa Miller wrote in today's Washington Post:

According to a 2007 Pew [Research Center] report, 15 percent of all Hispanics in the United States are Evangelical, and among native-born Hispanics, the number is as high as 30 percent. White Evangelicals, concerned about their institutional future in a country where religious affiliation is declining, see that Hispanics are sitting in their pews, taking communion and worrying about their families’ safety as anti-immigration laws like Arizona’s go into effect. (The Roman Catholic bishops also call for comprehensive immigration reform, but notice that in this case, Catholics and Evangelicals did not work together as they so often do on abortion and other social issues. That’s because competition for Hispanic souls in America is so fierce. “We call it strategic recruitment,” [Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference] said.)"

Maybe I'm encouraged because I'm desperate for good news about immigration policy. Most of what's happened in the name of "immigration reform" over the last few years especially has gone from dreary to depressing -- a lot of beating up on immigrants and avoiding real solutions. In contrast, the Evangelicals statement therefore gives some hope. Maybe only a little, but I'll take that. Let's see what happens.

This is, of course, as it should be. A civil society is one in which decent people push the indecent ones beyond the margins and keep them out of the public square where serious and respectful discourse happens. It's about affirming and sustaining a standard of what is right and good. I'm not talking about government censorship. No, I mean reasonable people speaking up to put the actions of the people like Limbaugh in their proper context. Without those voices, everything is acceptable, even the unacceptable. There's far too little of that.

But the big question for me is, how is this latest outrage much different from any other Limbaugh has made over the years?

I was going to starting citing a few examples just to make the case that Limbaugh has been at this game for years, that this is nothing new. But I realized that would be like proving water is wet. Can't we -- people from across the ideological continuum who might not always agree on policy -- stipulate that his brand is outrage, intellectual dishonesty and the sort of nastiness he turned on Sandra Fluke? Isn't that why millions of people (including many who disagree with him but enjoy the nuttiness) tune in to Limbaugh, to be provoked? Is that what he consciously delivers? So stipulated?

Besides, there's such a mountain of examples of Limbaugh's vileness it's hard to know where exactly to begin. This is what he does every day. Okay, just two examples:

To one apparently African American caller, Limbaugh once said: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back."

He's 'gone too far' many times before. So what's special about this particular incident? I mean, why wasn't he drummed out of decent society long ago?

Sure, there have been plenty of liberal voices that have tried to expose and oppose Limbaugh for years. Heck, there's even an organization -- Media Matters for America -- devoted to documenting everything he and the other right-wing radio shouters say.

But, all of the sudden, we're hearing from conservatives and Limbaugh's advertisers. All of the sudden, it's not enough just to dismiss him as "an entertainer" and leave it at that -- knowing full well that his poison and distortion (and that of the Limbaugh copycats, who seem to be everywhere) have been useful in tearing down anyone to the left of Tea Party, which presumably has been good for Republicans.

About those condemnations. Some have been absolutely honorably full-throated denunciations from well-known conservatives/Republicans, such as David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Scott Brown, Carly Fiorina and others.

Beyond the political class, Most Honorable Mention goes to John DeGioia, President of Georgetown, who sent a letter to students and faculty supporting Fluke's congressional testimony. "She was respectful, sincere, and spoke with conviction," he wrote. "She provided a model of civil discourse. This expression of conscience was in the tradition of the deepest values we share as a people." And this from the guy whose university policy Fluke was disagreeing with. His letter was truly inspiring and the mark of moral leadership.

In contrast, much has been made in the last day or two of similar denunciations by Republican leaders. But when you look much more closely, they seem kind of restrained to me -- lame, to put it another way.

A spokesperson for House Speaker John Boehner (not even Boehner himself) commented: "The Speaker obviously believes the use of those words [by Limbaugh] was inappropriate, as is trying to raise money off the situation."

That last bit is an attempt to turn it around and blame Democrats and liberal organizations for supposedly using this incident to raise money from their supporters. First of all, these organizations probably don't have to even ask. People are so pissed they're likely expressing their ire by helping the organizations that do battle on women's issues. Second, if someone called Boehner's daughter a slut and a prostitute, do you think he would issue a meek and morally compromised statement like that -- much less through a surrogate?

The current Republican Party candidates for the GOP presidential nomination sounded similarly subdued, though they can technically say they 'went on record' against Limbaugh.

"That's not the language I would have used," Romney said, adding they he is just out there to talk about jobs. That was it.

Mr. Morality, Rick Santorum, offered a Rush-being-Rush rationalization: "He's being absurd. I mean, you know, an entertainer can be absurd." In other words, don’t take him seriously.

And Ron Paul just punted it back to Rush: "You'd have to ask him about his crudeness."

(Let's see what they say on the Sunday morning shows tomorrow, where this issue is sure to come up, and hope there's a little more courage.)

Timid responses, but I guess pretty forceful considering that these guys have never said much to put the Limbaugh’s of the world in their proper place. Indeed, they’ve been happy to let the shouters fire up their base and tear down the Democrats.

And advertisers have been happy to keep supporting Limbaugh so long as he keeps delivering to them big numbers and good demographics.

I would like to believe that they reacted now because, in their hearts, even they were disgusted by Limbaugh’s attack on Fluke, and maybe that’s the case.

A more cynical explanation is that the politicos know that Limbaugh has said something that even some of the more hardcore base of the Republican Party, and certainly a large number (women and men) who tend toward the center, find enormously offensive. As it is, Republicans have played with fire in recent weeks by appearing to be dictating what women can and can’t do with their bodies – which is way off the message of jobs and debt that has been the core of their campaign for Congress and the White House. This could burn them.

I’ve been waiting for at least the last 20 years for all this ugly, dishonest garbage, spewed by the Limbaughs and tolerated (sometimes embraced) by conservative supporters, to come back and haunt both - because Americans are good and smart. I say that not because I disagree with conservatives on many, but not all, policy issues but because so many have conducted themselves shamefully and so many others have been perfectly happy to let them off the hook as long as it delivered votes for the party (or audiences for advertisers).

But, much to my amazement, time and time again over the years, the support for such crap seems only to have deepened and further distorted our politics. I truly hope this time it’s different, that this story won't just come and go. But, then, I’ve thought that before.

AMID THE VOLUMINOUS coverage of yesterday's caucuses, the Washington Post ran a feature photo today of a family from Rock Rapids, Iowa, next to a headline "Witness Politics: Their Faith is in Santorum." It's the sort of 'glimpse of the inner world of voters' that attempts to offer a little authenticity to the volumes of blather that pundits produce to fill so much air time.

Both the husband and wife who were featured told the photographer they would vote for Rick Santorum, and the caption describes them as "emblematic of evangelical conservatives."

The extended caption (I'm going with the text in the printed edition, which is slightly different from the online copy) goes on to say that the husband and wife said :

[T]hey couldn't vote for Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) because she is a woman, for Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) because of his anti-war views, for Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon, for former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) because of his infidelity and for Texas Gov. Rick Perry because he didn't get past the surface of the issues.

Assuming this couple is truly "emblematic of evangelical conservatives" (and let me point out that the Post owes readers and their subject a bit more to prove this is empirically true -- a snapshot of two people does not a demographic profile make), I'm a bit startled to see that they would make this sort of admission publicly, let alone think it in the first place.

Now, there are a truckload of reasons not to vote for Michele Bachmann. But to say categorically that she is unfit to be President because she is a woman, well, wow. Forgive my precious naivete, but are there still a lot of people in America who think this? And do they really think it's no big deal to say it out loud without any apparent embarrassment ? Haven't we gotten past that one out?

And then what about their view on Romney? Believe me, I'm aware of the theogical (and maybe it's even social and cultural) discomfort many evangelical Christians have when it comes to Mormons. But are we still living in a country where religion is a make-or-break factor in some people's judgment of their fitness for higher officer, or, presumably, anything else? (Well, when it comes to Muslims in particular, as I have discussed frequently in this blog, yeah.) Would I be justified in dismissing a candidate of a certain faith (say, an evangelical Christian), even if that person is clearly qualified and completely in synch with my own political views?

The comment about Paul is slightly more complicated, I think, though it raises questions. It's tempting to conclude that the couple here is "pro-war" because they rule out Paul for his "anti-war" views. But they could mean that, while war is undesireable and should be avoided at all cost, it is sometimes an option we have to choose. (Paul is, apparently, categorically against any sort of military action, or so I understand.) That's not such an unreasonable position, but I personally would not have been comfortable characterizing my vote so simplistically, knowing how much misunderstanding might be lurking in the vagueness. Maybe the journalist owed them a little more clarity than this. Or maybe she got them just right.

As for their objection to Gingrich: no surprise. Same for Perry, though I would argue (as The New Republic has in this excellent essay) that none of the Republican candiates got "past the surface of the issues." (Democrats are not immune from this at times, either, by the way.)

I'm hesitant to make any broad-sweeping generalizations about evangelical Christians based on this isolated example. Indeed, much as I may disagree with many on certain issues, I sincerely believe most evangelical Christians are representative of the whole of society, which is to say they have good and decent intentions. And this could be a case of bad translatiby the newspaper.

But, not that any will listen to me, but if I were an evangelical Christian, I would step up and say that these two are not at all "emblematic" of their community. And, if I were Rick Santorum, I would do the same. Otherwise, we're left with the feeling that they embrace pretty unfortunate views. And Santorum would need to prove to me that as President of the United States, he will represent all the American people.

The shameful anti-Muslim fervor that tripped the wire of wall-to-wall coverage this time is part of a troubling and growing pattern, and it was not, as some of the discussion seems to imply, the work of a lone perpetrator. Lone perpetrators don't get this much traction unless the conditions are right in the first place. And they were.

The program (which I have never watched) reportedly portrayed Muslims in Michigan as, well, all-American -- which is to say, not especially unusual Americans. They carried on their lives -- as most Muslims in America do -- rather prosaically.

Indeed, as one Muslim American wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, "The plotlines featured in the previews -- a young couple preparing to wed, another planning the arrival of a baby, a high school football coach putting his athletes through grueling practice -- seemed high on sweetness and low on drama. Since the ordinariness of a Muslim life is something I experience everyday, I felt no need to have it demonstrated for me on television."

That banality may have been bad TV (a criterion that hasn't kept other such reality shows from getting good ratings), but it was a red flag for the Florida Family Association, which has a reputation for dangerous intolerance. The all-American Muslims on the show just didn't square with FFA's central assumption "that Islam and those who practice some of it’s [sic] deviant rules have been doing so for thousands of years and are a threat world wide including in America."

Enough has been said, I think, about how businesses by Lowe's and Kayak faltered morally by caving in (only "in part", they say) to FFA's campaign to gin up a false threat about Islam and the Muslims among us. These businesses and the many other people who bought into this bigotry should really be ashamed, and I'm pleased to see there's been a big groundswell of condemnation for their views. Their behavior is about as un-American as it gets.

Before someone tries to take this discussion in direction that is beside my point, let me stipulate, as I have in previous posts that, yes, there are Muslims who are truly a violent threat to Americans and other "infidels". They scare the shit out of me, and the world must stop them. End of disclaimer.

(But I'm also convinced (based on empirical research and lots of anecdotal evidence of my own) that the vast majority of Muslims do not buy this extremist notion of Islam. In fact, for good reason, many despise these miltants more than even the FFA.)

One of the nutrients that enriches soil for the sort of bigotry FFA cultivates is the noise we hear from advocates against sharia law. These folks have convinced themselves that Muslims have an agenda to replace secular U.S. law with Islamic (sharia) law. They have conjured this completely out of thin air by pointing to (real) Islamically based theocracies such as Iran as the model of what most Muslims want to do in America. They leave aside that, unlike the Irans of the world, the U.S. has a strong and resilient legal tradition that prohibits this very possibility. (I don't think it's a stretch to assume, by the way, that most of these same people would be untroubled if Christian theology replaced much of American civil law. These details get in the way.)

As far as I can tell, the anti-sharia-ists still represent a minority view in the U.S. According to a recent opinion study, a substantial majority of Americans reject the notion that American Muslims ultimately want to establish sharia as the law of the land in the U.S (61 percent disagree, 30 percent agree).

But, wait: why don't a much higher number of Americans see the anti-sharia crusade as snake oil? I'd like to see more than 90 percent, but I guess that's dreaming.

And if anti-sharia-ists are in the minority, how is that, as the New York Times reported, "Since last year, more than two dozen states have considered measures to restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or foreign and religious laws more generally. The statutes have been enacted in three states so far." All of these are likely to be struck down, even by sensible conservative jurists, as unconstitutional.

One of the most visible (but far from only) evangelists for the dangerous lie about sharia in the U.S. is none other than Newt Gingrich. Because he is such a profilic dispenser of so many whacky views (even the danger of electromagnetic pulses!), I probably shouldn't be surprised that his espousal of anti-sharia nonsense over the last 18 months or so got a lot less attention than it deserved. Until recently, that is, when his candidacy.for the Republican presidential nomination began to surge and heightened scrutiny followed.

Back in July 2010, Gingrich delivered a speech in which he defiantly declared that no court anywhere in the United States should be "allowed to consider sharia as a replacement for American law. Period." He claimed that:

"radical Islamists want to impose sharia on all of us - for legitimate reasons. Let me be clear: you can respect your adversary without agreeing or giving in. They have profound and deeply held beliefs, and one of the great challenges for securalists is they can't understand the level of passion that a belief, which is derived from an underlying religious form, leads one to have, which is why, frankly, deeply believing Christian and Jewish Americans have a much better understanding of what's going on than do secular intellectuals from deracinated unversities looking out of their ivory tower trying to wonder what it is that would lead people to kill themselves and having no comprehension of the emotions and the depth of passion.

...[S]tealth jihadists use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools and violent jihadists use violence. But in fact they're both engaged in jihad, and they are both seeking to oppose the same end state, which is to replace Western Civilization with a radical imposition of sharia.... Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrant to the Western world and the underlying basic belief, which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western traditiion, which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved and given us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who oppose it.... The principle of sharia is painful execution, not just death.... [It] is a direct, mortal threat to virtually every value that the Left has.

Whew. Sorry to bog down the discussion here, but I think it's instructive to see how much Gingrich mixes up a bunch of ideas that sound really smart but have no relation to one another when you look closely. It's what gives him the appearance of being an intellectual. In this short space he includes: irrelevant attacks on "secularists" in their "deracinated" "ivory towers (but wait, by opposing the threat of sharia, isn't he playing a "secularist" himself?); chastisements of those who belive that "law comes directly from God" (but won't that offend many folks, like those at FFA, who think the same thing about their own bibles?); and "respect" for the very adversaries who are such a threat to Western civlization.

Imagine the justified hue and cry that would follow a speech from a similar prominent figure who made the same sort of statements about Christian theology or Jewish law. But it's striking that Gingrich can say things like this and get only a shrug from most, if that.

But the worst problem is his use of truly trivial examples that offer no proof whatsoever of a concerted effort to impose sharia law on America. Later in the speech, Gingrich talked about a legal case in New Jersey in which (according to Gingrich) a judge excused the violent acts by a man against his wife because they were an extension of the religious law (Islam) the man follows.

No, Professor Gingrich, as terrible as that ruling may have been (a higher court rightly overturned it), that's not an example of how Muslims are trying to impose sharia on American law. It's a misapplication of important U.S. laws that allow reasonable accommodation of a person's religious beliefs. (For example, in some states Jews can be exempted from laws that require autopsies, which are prohibited under Jewish law.)

It's telling, too, that Gingrich appeared to have jumped on this bandwagon last year (and, at the same time, contributed to it) when he was openly entertaining the idea of running for President. Similarly, 2010 was the time when his views appeared to moving toward the extremist outlook of many Tea Partiers, and he was effusive in his praise of them. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but, if I'm right, it's sickening to think that he's fanning flames of bigotry just to win votes. His only other defense is that he doesn't realize he's doing it. Either way, that's not what I call presidential material.

What's scary is that these are the sorts of examples Gingrich and like-minded zealots have relied on to generate the rage against Muslims. In other words, like the FFA's critique of "All-American Muslims", the fury is based on a made-up threat, a straw man. Indeed, research and anecdotal evidence suggest that most Muslims support America's tradition of separation of religion. This means the controversry is really about pure ethnic hostility, not about a clash over the "big ideas" and "values" guys like Gingrich pretend to stand for.

I'm not pinning all the anti-Muslim fervor in the U.S. on Gingrich or even on the others who peddle the anti-sharia gospel. There are plenty of other sources of the misinformation and hostility about Muslims in America, to name a few: the guy in Florida last year who threatened to burn Korans; the people who turned the Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan into a sinister symbol; Herman Cain's ominous declaration earlier this year that he would never have a Muslim in his cabinet, and so on.

So while there is no excuse for how Lowe's and Kayak panicked when they heard that there was something subversive happening at TLC, one can almost understand why they reacted the way they did. They can probably feel the way the wind seems to be blowing. It's reminiscent of how the entertainment industry responded to Joseph McCarthy's bluster in the 1950s.

It is dangerous and, if I may borrow a sentiment, a sin, to traffick in lies that one religious minority is a mortal threat to the rest of society. As a Jew, I find that chillingly familiar and scary. As an American, I'm ashamed and worried about the future of this country and the ideals that have made it great.

IT'S MORE than a little ironic that the death of Vaclav Havel, who played a major role in disintegrating a totalitarian regime, coincided roughly with the announcement of the death of Kim Jong Il, who committed himself to sustaining such a regime. They were two sides of a similar coin. Without men like Kim, Havel would have had no reason to risk his life to bring about generational change; without men like Havel, Kim would have no concrete excuse (though he probably had many imagined ones) to so ruthlesslessly enforce the kind of perverse system injustice and inhumanity that defines his nation.

This extraordinary video footage offers a spectacular example of just how bizarre the North Korean lie was and apparently remains. It shows masses of North Koreans weeping hysterically in public over the last few days in the wake of the "Dear Leader's" passing. At times, the din of the crying seems almost deafening and the histrionics extreme.

There could be many social and psychological reasons for this outpouring, some have suggested. But there's quite possibly something else going on there, according to at least one former party ideology boss (quoted here) who defected to South Korea in 1997 and said that after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 “anything other than mourning was not allowed.”

“The party conducted surveys to see who displayed the most grief, and made this an important criterion in assessing party members’ loyalty. Patients who remained in hospitals and people who drank and made merry even after hearing news of their leader’s death were all singled out for punishment.” Even those who remained merely dry-eyed, he said, were harshly reprimanded and penalized. In other words, for many the grief is just a government-engineered show from which the people are not free to desist.

The scene of the North Korean mourners instantly reminds me of an unforgettable vignette Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes in "The Gulag Archipelago". In the late-1930s in Moscow Province, Solzhenitsyn documented, a district Pary conference took place:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up.... The small hall echoed with "stormy applause, rising to an ovation." For three, minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the "stormy applause rising to an ovation" continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting with exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would be the first to stop?

The applause continued for nine, ten minutes, but no one could figure out just how they could possibly end the agony, even though they were all surely conscious of the insanity of it all. It's hypothetically possible they would have gone on clapping for much longer had it not been for a certain director of a paper factory, who, after a full 11 minutes of the nonsense, "assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat."

And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That was, however, how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different.

This is what Havel called "living within the lie," enabling a great charade to govern all of life. As he wrote in 1978, the totalitarian system is:

...thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial intluence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing."

Havel added that "when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game, everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably."

This breaking of the rules (or jumping off the revolving wheel, as Solzhenitsyn might put it) is what Havel called "living within the truth" -- difficult and dangerous business, as the examples from North Korea and the Soviet Union illustrate. It can take generations, if ever, before "living within the truth" cracks the granite infrastructure of a totalitarian regime. People like Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the many other dissidents across the globe and history have put up with unthinkable physical pain, psychological and economic depredation and, worst of all, the demoralization at times that their sacrifices may be all for naught.

Havel's legacy takes us back to a time that seems so distant now it's hard to believe a society so absurd, dehumanizing and utlimately self-destructive could ever have existed. Kim's present-day North Korea is, of course, the smelling salt that wakes us from such disbelief. It reminds me also of how extraordinary those people are who "live within the truth" and how mere mortals like me are not fit for such a noble and difficult existence.

YOU DON'T have to look very far these days to find a lot of disappointment, and sometimes digust and depression, about the job Barack Obama is doing as President. And I'm just talking about how Democrats and other of his natural supporters feel.

To a point, you can count me in. I've still not forgiven him for his inexplicable acquiesence to Congressional Republicans over allowing the tax cuts for wealthy Americans to expire at the end of last year. Those tax cuts never made sense when the Bush Administration and Republican Congress enacted them in 2001; they have not, as promised, led to anything close to widespread economic prosperity, and they contributed to the soaring debt that Republicans themselves are now saying is the most important problem in America. And, of course, Republicans are blaming that problem on the Democrats and Obama in particular, which seems chilingly Orwellian.

Mostly, I was furious that the President indulged the bullying tactics of the Republicans, and I can't fathom why he apparently (what do I really know?) did the same in the debt-ceiling negotiations.

I understand his problem and sympathize. He enters these negotiations trying to exercise good faith, to be a statesmen for all the people and a pragmatist. But it's like he and most of the Democrats who've been battling the extreme postions of the Republican Party are bringing a racquet to a tennis match, as one does when playing tennis. The problem is their opponents are bringing heavy artillery to the game and using it without hesitation. Somehow, the Republicans are getting away with that and have for many years now.

But, as I said above, I'm disappointed only to a point. I absolutely refuse to pile on or abandon President Obama right now, not because I'm one of those staunchly loyal partisans who won't dare to acknolwedge that the Emperor just might not have clothes. Nor am I so in love with him (I voted for Hillary in the primary), though I like him. I'm keeping my patience for two reasons:

First, beating up on Obama right now is yet another way to give a victory to the truly bad actors in our political system and to the way they've twisted reality. I'm so weary of Republicans who accuse the President and the Democrats of the very partisan recalcitrance and intellectual dishonesty that Republicans practice themselves. It's just not true. But they get away with it most of the time.

Indeed, we're constantly hearing public commentators say that both political parties share equal blame for the chaos and pessimism that now encumbers the nation. Paul Krugman was absolutely right when he wrote last week that:

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands....

Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.... when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

If it's any consolation, a New York Times poll released today found that more Americans (72 percent) disapproved of the way Republicans handled the debt-ceiling negotiations than of the way Democrats (62 percent) and Obama (47 percent) did. That said, a record proportion of Americans (82 percent) told that same poll that they disapprove of how Congress is doing its job. That's all of Congress, which (for now) still includes a lot of Democrats.

The second reason I'm not piling on Obama right now is because I remain completely convinced that his more pragmatic, post-ideological impluses are exactly what the United States needs in a President right now. Prior to his taking office, we had eight years of an administration that was driven -- most of the time -- by ideology and not by pragmatism. It did so openly and without apology, and the result of the 2008 election was, as far as I'm concerned, more a rejection of that style of governing than of any great affection for Obama and the Democrats. I think people were just sick and tired of the inflexibility, especially when it led to disastrous outcomes.

I'm just sorry that Obama hasn't been able to act more on his pragmatic, post-ideological impulses. What came out of the debt ceiling bill is not pragmatic policy, let alone a good framework for governing. What emerged is an agreement to put the ball at the Democrats' 20 yard line; deep in their own territory with their heels near their own end zone. The ultra-extreme Republicans voted against the agreement because the ball isn't on the Democrats' 1 yard line. (Sorry for all the sports allusions, but they're working for me right now.)

How did Obama and the Democrats let that happen? Why is it that he and the Congressional Democrats essentially conceded the highly dubious assertion that what this country needs right now is to slash government spending and taxes? Why did they allow Republicans to determine the frame of the discussion?

Why didn't they take the offensive and simply say, 'Look, everyone, up is not down, black is not white, and we simply can't keep the economy moving the right direction if we suddenly take huge sums of money out of it. Indeed, we need to do just the opposite and pump more cash into the economy via government programs.'

I mean, if the Republicans can prattle on and on about what they think is good policy (and, to be fair to them, I believe most really do think that starving the government beast is good policy), why can't the Dems and the President mount the same sort of offensive to the contrary?

I know: things aren't as simple as all that, and it's not easy being President, especially when outrage from an extremist element of our electorate has gained momentum just as we're facing some of the most serious problems we've seen in generations. The timing is terrible. And he can disagree with the extemists, but it's hard to ignore them completely.

Notwithstanding the sound of all the hand-wringing on the left and knife-sharping on the right, I think -- hope -- Obama has the sense and sensibility to break the inertia of the course we're on right now. Let's give him the room to work, and let's see how I feel in about six months.

THE WASHINGTON POST published an article today about Republican Members of Congress who refuse to believe warnings that a failure to raise the federal debt ceiling will result in economic catastrophe for the United States. It doesn't faze them that credentialed economists, rating agencies, business leaders, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, top budget analysts, their own Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader and pretty much everyone who knows anything about this stuff say that the consequencs will be dire. As Representative Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama, told the Post, “There should be no default on August 2. In fact, our credit rating should be improved by not raising the debt ceiling.”

In the article, Representative Rick Crawford, a Republican from Arkansas, said he feels pressure from constituents not to vote for an increase in the debt limit. Asked if he has tried to explain to them the consequences of this course of action, Crawford said, “I think that’s probably an arrogant attitude to take, that I know more than they do. I’m trying to represent my district in Washington, and not Washington in my district.”

Now, I'm all for ensuring that the ideas of even a minority should count for something in the marketplace of policy making. But don't our leaders at some point also have a responsibility to, well, lead and to tell The People what's up and what's down, especially on highly technical issues like this one? I mean, if 25 percent of our fellow Americans believe that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, should we just take their word for it -- if that untruth were to have any bearing on the broader public interest?

Wait a minute, one may say, the rising of the sun is a scientifically proven phenomenon. The impact of the default of federal debt is really speculation. Yes, but, first of all, it's a fact that many who mind the global bond markets say those markets will almost certainly respond adversely if the U.S. defaults. And the rating agencies are threatening to downgrade U.S. credit, which will at the very least make it more costly for us as a nation to borrow.

Second, there are other scientific facts that many, particularly from the same segment of the U.S. ideological spectrum, have chosen to ignore to the detriment of the public interest. As I've written before, this willful ignorance extends to climate change and the theory of evolution, which are settled questions among a preponderance of people who really know what they're talking about. And it wasn't too long ago that John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, offered a tortured explanation as to why he won't try to disabuse many Americans of their belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim, even if he, John Boehner, doesn't share their view. I'm not surprised that some out there don't agree with the consensus; that's the way of the world. But it's discouraging, to say the least, to see our political leadership indulging such ignorance.

Some day, someone will be able to discern the extent to which this willful ignorance -- not just about the debt ceiling, but some of these other contentious issues -- began not with The People but with the leaders themselves. Really, before the debt ceiling debate began to dominate the news a few months ago, how many rank-and-file Americans knew much at all about the issue, let alone had an opinion about it? (Not me.) How is it that roughly so many Americans, according to Pew, got it in their heads that raising the debt ceiling would be bad and failure to do so would have no consequence? I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence, but this is something about which specialists have a bit more expertise than average Americans.

It's not "arrogant," Congressman Crawford, to tell your constituents sometime that you -- or the real experts -- know more than they do. That's part of your job as a leader.

Doesn't it seem plausible that, as they have so many times over the years, Republicans framed this particular issue in a way that would alarm and catalyze their base? They've done it on taxes and spending, crime, affirmative action, and other matters. The cap-and-trade legislation, for example, which passed the House and failed in the Senate two years ago, was re-branded by Republicans as a big "tax" and a potential drag on the economy (which was debatable, but far fetched), not as something we need to do to get a handle on the ill effects of massive carbon emissions into our atmosphere. The health reform legislation that President Obama championed was framed by Republicans as a scheme to make our expensive and fractured health care system more expensive and fractured. Up suddenly became down. East suddenly transformed itself into west. White became black, and the spectre of widespread economic disaster has become something not to worry about.

I have some admiration for Republicans' ability to pull off this cynical sleight of hand, except that talent of theirs has so distorted our public policy debates -- as is the case now -- led us to the brink of catastrophe. It's almost as if they wouldn't mind the catastrophe to visit the nation so long as it meant strenghening their own party's political fortunes.

One more anecdote, also from today's Washington Post, that reinforces how detached certain leaders seem to be from reality. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified yesterday before the Senate Banking Committee, where two of the Committee members, Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), "pitched the idea that the government could avoid default simply by prioritizing debt payments over less important things, such as 'a reimbursement to a vendor or failing to cut the grass at the monuments,' Toomey said.

“'That would require us to stop paying almost half of our other bills,' Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. 'Isn’t that just default by another name?' he asked Bernanke, and then asked whether it would still result in a downgrade of the country’s credit.

“'Yes,' the Fed chief answered. 'I do not think this is a direction we want to go.'

I'M IN THE MIDDLE of a terrific new Civil War history: 1861 by Adam Goodheart. As the title suggests, it's about the events and states of mind that led up to outbreak of the war between the states. The book shines a light on a much different episode in American history than the one we celebrate today, July 4. But, like the July 4 holiday, it reminds us that one of the constant features of our nation's history is re-creation (not recreation, which is what we usually we do to observe these important historical mileposts).

In the months leading up to the Civil War, the people of the United States found that they could no longer live with the great compromises they had negotiated among themselves for decades. Though no one knew in late 1860 and early 1861 precisely how President-elect Abraham Lincoln would address the twin problem of slavery and potential disunion (according to the custom of the time, he made hardly any public appearances or utterances during his election campaign and before he took office), his earlier pronouncements and his party's platform strongly suggested an abandonment of the long-held status quo.

To the chagrin of the hardcore abolitionists, it was not quite full emancipation of slaves. But, on the other hand, Southerners feared Lincoln would end the institution of slavery, on which they (and really the entire country, North and South) relied. One by one, even before Lincoln took office and before the first shots at Fort Sumter, Southern members of Congress resigned their seats and headed back home to create a new and separate nation. In spite of last-ditch efforts by some to stave off this split by offering Southern states even more appeasements, the slide to secession -- and war -- seemed (at least in retrospect) inexorable. How frightening that must of have been for everyone, even those who were believed firmly in the righteousness of their cause.

If ever there were ripe moments for the U.S. to re-create itself, this was one of them -- though perhaps more abruptly and cataclysmically than any other since the Revolution. To draw on one of the overused images of our current age, neither Southerners nor Northerners wanted to kick the can of indecision further down the road as they had for decades. This was the end of the line, a calling of the question of whether this country could continue to look away from the stark inconsistency between the values it set on July 4, 1776 (and later in 1787 with the Constitution) and the practice of slavery. And it was apparently time to settle whether or not this was indeed one cohesive nation or a collection of many states, each with its own right to accept or ignore the fundamental principles of the federal government.

In 1776, the founders of the nation also engaged in a far-reaching act of re-creation. As in 1861, the status quo of colonization by Great Britain became untenable, and acknowledgment of that fact (The Declaration of Independence) was just the first act of bravery. The next -- defending that acknowlegment and even dying for it -- took even more courage. That's ostensibly what we celebrate today July 4.

But July 4 is also about the act of re-creation. America seems always to be in a constant state of re-creation, not necessarily on the scale we saw in the 1860s or during any of the other major historical turning points, but in small, simple, imperceptible ways. Perhaps like few places anywhere, America's social and political systems were built not only to withstand re-creation but to encourage it -- civilly and constructively. One of the core assumptions of our system is that the enterprise of nation building is never perfect or complete and that we must be able to improve it constantly.

That, to me, is one of the aspects of American Exceptionalism (not, as some voices today have implied, that we are always better and stronger than every other nation and that anyone who says otherwise is a traitor). It is, to me, one of the other reasons to celebrate on July 4.

To be sure, there have been other acts of social and political re-creation in American history that resulted in powerful upheavals -- the civil rights movement, the Great Depression and the rise of organized labor are notable among them. And there's no question that many of our major military engagements, particularly the great World Wars, transformed us socially and politically, not only here in the U.S. but on the global stage. But I think one can argue that none were nearly as traumatic and sweeping as the Revolution and the Civil War and that, before and after each, the U.S. was a completely different nation.

Thankfully, the simple, less noticeable acts of re-creation in America come and go without the crashes of lightning Americans endured when they spawned the new republic in the late 18th century and then fought fiercely to keep it intact in the mid-19th. As vituperative, grotesque and seemingly insoluable as our present-day political and social disputes can be, I truly can't imagine them reaching the sort of breaking point they did in 1861 when the only real option was all-out war. Maybe because we as a nation understand, even today, how truly painful that conflict was, I have strong faith in our ability as a nation, which revers the rule of law, to work out our differences civilly and peacefully (even if that means adopting some screwy options, which are not in short supply these days).

This was one in a series of in-depth investigative reports by NPR and Pro-Publica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, about how the U.S. military has not grappled sufficiently with the aftereffects of TBI (traumatic brain injury) and PTSD among those who have suffered them in action, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The result of these reports has been some very public responses by our miltary and veterans affairs officials that treatment of service members with these maladies needs reform and improvement. This is a case of where journalism is truly making a difference.

Moreover, the stories you hear -- from the service members themselves and the families who through hell to care for them -- are chilling and heartbreaking. In addition to spurring better handling of these wounded warriors, the stories on this NPR series remind us, as Marine Lt. Gen. John Kelly did in this recent Washington Post article, of the continued sacrifice a relative few Americans are making on behalf of the country. "We are in a life-and-death struggle, but not our whole country," said Kelly, whose own son, a Marine, was killed in Afghanistan last November. "One percent of Americans are touched by this war. Then there is a much smaller club of families who have given all." At the very least (and this is not much), the rest of us owe it to them to pay attention, to keep their plight from being out of sight and out of mind.

I could -- maybe should -- go on about that, but I'm still thinking about my post the other day on NPR and the reaction to it. As I expected, not everyone agrees with me that notions that NPR is guilty of "liberal bias" are misplaced. Fair enough, I suppose. As I said, I think it's all about what appears in the eye of the beholder.

Still, when I encounter work like the NPR series on brain injury and PTSD among the military, I can't understand what these other eyes are beholding. Tell me, please, where is the "liberal bias" in this journalism? Is it "liberal" to raise a mirror up to our government about something it might want to improve? And since when is it "liberal" to be standing up for the needs of people in the military service? If anything, hasn't the right claimed that for itself?

And please detail for me how this particular bit of journalism differs from all the rest that NPR generates daily -- indeed, around the clock. Is this an anomoly?

THERE'S A LOT OF BIG NEWS around the world right now, more than global media outlets and even their audiences might have a chance to digest. Amidst it all, two tweets today, posted within a half hour of one another on the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Twitter feed:

So, even as missile attacks from Gaza continue to rain down on it, Israel allows essential aid to go through -- according to this report. That explodes -- sorry -- challenges what many might know or assume about Israel's stance on Gaza: that Israel's trying to choke off Gaza residents and that Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel.

Let's put a bookmark on these and keep them in mind when the focus shifts back, as it inevitably will, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Aside from his views, which I'll summarize in a moment, what I like most about this piece is that he offers a much more civil, authorative and informed analysis about the problems of governent (city government mostly) than what we've gotten recently from the many shrill voices emerging around the standoff in Madison, Wisconsin. The implication is that all the heat generated there around the Governor's efforts to ban collective bargaining rights of public employee unions misses a big point and keeps us from dealing with the real issue.

According to Goldsmith, "It is not government unions per se but progressive government itself—long celebrated in Wisconsin, New York and elsewhere—that no longer produces progressive results."

"In the early 20th century," Goldsmith continues, "the progressives championed a rule-based approach to public-sector management that was a big step forward from the cronyism and corruption of Tammany Hall. Today, however, the very rules that once enhanced accountability, transparency and efficiency now stifle the creativity of public-sector workers and reduce the ability of public investments to create opportunities for citizens—outcomes precisely the opposite of those intended by Progressive Era reformers.

"...No one wants a return to the bad old days when public employees feared arbitrary dismissals. Today, however, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Rather than too few rules governing public employees, there are far too many, and they hurt the very people progressive reformers cared most about: the least fortunate members of society who depend the most on effective support services."

Though I have a graduate degree in urban planning, I don't claim to have the kind of understanding, let alone insight, Goldsmith does on this subject. But, like so many people who have come in contact with public-sector bureaucracies (I'm sure we all have stories), I can only agree with Goldsmith that something has gotten out of hand. Something needs to change, I'm not sure what. It's not abandoning government altogether, as some of the more extreme voices in America suggest today, but making it work better. Many devoted public servants have tried to cut through and rationalize the complex problem of government bureaucracy, including Goldsmith. It's a difficult riddle to solve.

But, again, my point in highlighting this Op-Ed is more about the state of our public discourse. What I conclude after reading Goldsmith's analysis (I suspect he would agree, but this isn't his point) is that grand gestures like banning collective bargaining of public employee unions are misleading and clearly meant more to rally angry voters than to actually solve a very real challenge.

We need to discuss tough problems like this with the sort of civility and authority Goldsmith offers. Unfortunately, that kind of cool and courteous talk doesn't make as compelling TV as people screaming at each other at the Wisconson State Capitol.